


Poisson d'Avril

by Anonymous



Series: Write drunk, edit sober. [3]
Category: Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: April Fools' Day, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 03:58:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1495735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Italy, France, Belgium, and French-speaking areas of Switzerland and Canada, April 1 tradition is often known as “April fish” (<em>poisson d’avril</em> in French or <em>pesce d’aprile</em> in Italian). This includes attempting to attach a paper fish to the victim’s back without being noticed. </p>
            </blockquote>





	Poisson d'Avril

In some towns, tricking someone into trading for a low level, freshly caught magikarp is a vicious scam.

In Lumiose, at least on the first of April, it’s tradition. And like most of the overly ridiculous, excitable holiday festivities, the fish-trading is exuberant, expected, and often over the top.

Finding full pokéballs tucked into various untouched corners, each rattling quietly with the flopping of twenty pounds of irate but harmless fish is only to be expected.

So far, the Professor has acquired three new magikarp, one surprisingly weighty, and it’s barely midmorning.

When he finds the next one tucked into the crease between the seat and back of his deskchair, where it must have been dropped while he was on the second floor. Just checking in with the team, and definitely not tucking the trio magikarp balls underneath rinsed and drying coffee mugs.

A bright pink and green sticker plastered over the release button in the shape of glittering stars practically  _screams_ Shauna, and if she’s come back to the city for the day, then so has the rest of her class, which means there are at least four more secreted here and there.

He suspects he will find Trevor and Tierno’s easily enough, but putting Calem and Serena in the same room at the same time means that they were bound to have gone to ridiculous lengths to outdo each other. It might be a week before he comes across them.

Chuckling, he balance’s Shauna’s pokéball on the tips of his fingers, tossing it spryly into the air to expand, and rolling it over his palm as he wanders to the water-type weighing scales behind the labs. As if there aren’t more magikarp in every statistical database in Kalos than anything else.

But it’s habit.

There are a pair of pokéballs abandoned beside the scales, along with a note in Sina’s tight script, though it bears Dexio’s signature.

> _Don’t think we’ve forgotten about last year, Professor!_

No matter how many times he tries to convince them that the dumping of three  _hundred_ pokeballs full of freshly caught Magikarp in their lockers was not his doing- where would he find the  _time_ , let alone the money to waste on that many empty balls- they refuse to believe him.

At least the reverse of the note has proper measurements for the two pokemon in their balls, right down to habit-monitoring results that the balls can only collect after several days of captivity. His assistants are nothing if not thorough.

And perhaps a little too excitable.

Then again, he’s grinning as he releases Shauna’s magikarp into the small pool of water placed in the center of a pressure pad. 

Twenty one pounds, nine ounces. Just shy of average.

He scratches down the magikarp’s numbers on his tablet, then adds Sina and Dexio’s results too. What he’s going to do with  _another_ three magikarp, though, he has no idea. Probably just drop them in a desk drawer and take them all out to be released behind the Battle Chateau over the weekend. Or drop them in internal mailboxes completely at random.

Between leafing through results from the rest of the team- usually with a pokeball compressed and tucked in the rings of the binders- and drafting the outline for their next publication, the rest of the day passes comparatively quickly.

He ends up with nineteen of them when he is forced out of his office by a light head and a panging stomach at eight o’clock that night, a mesh bag full of magikarp clanking plasticky at his side.

He tosses a few at wandering school children who really should be getting home, considering the dusky grey sky. A pair are dropped in the lap to a young couple kissing too obliviously in the plaza to notice.

There are still a dozen with him when he opens his flat and starts in on a perfectly reasonable sandwich made of somewhat questionable looking leftover paella. He is an adult. This is adult food. He’s going to eat it.

The bread ends up torn to pieces and dunked in a bowl of hot chocolate. That’s perfectly reasonable too, it’s getting warmer, and this may be his last chance at hot chocolate for months.

He eyes the sack of magikarps, and makes an ass of himself by grinning while trying to eat sopping bread, and dribbling chocolate down his front.

But he likes what the silly fish represent. The people around him care, and think of him. Even if magikarp are utterly useless to him, or to most people. 

Of course, there are a few trainers who bother with them, and fewer still who can coax them to their full potential before growing nauseous with the interminable process.

He tells himself that he is thinking about his grandfather, who occasionally tutors aspiring dragon tamers. He’ll be swamped with well meaning but ultimately noncommital students for the next week or two, all bulked down with weakly flopping fish. That is definitely where his mind is going.

His grandfather is a rickety old man, with teak-tanned skin and hair so white that the contrast almost hurts. He’s ancient and tough as leather, and if he looked like a cat of any sort in his youth it has all been subsumed with the wrinkles and crags that he and his dragons share, all sharkish skin and gaunt, gauging eyes.

He makes a fair match for the glum old gyarados that lives in the pond in the center of his sprawling property.

But a gyarados should not be glum. It should be massive and imposing, a water dragon worthy of Kanton Emperors and Kalosian Kings.

And there is one particular gyarados, whom the Professor had seen as a wimpy magikarp years ago, who had loomed briefly like a god, like a Legend.

He isn’t thinking about that.

He isn’t.

He never even saw a Gyarados in the throes of mega evolution for himself. Sonia had been given the task of analyzing the data in Serena and Calem’s recordings of the events. The Professor had been far too busy trying not to vomit while still forcing himself to eat regular portions for the first two weeks afterwards.

His nerves could not possibly have handled  _seeing_ it all. And though the records were still there, neatly tagged and titles in the Sycamore Lab databases, he had never bothered to seek them out. Sonia’s dry, empirical text, littered with numbers and estimations and measures was more than enough.

His chocolate is cold and starting to develop a skin. Lumps of dissolved bread make it look like mud.

He throws it out, and decides he’ll simply forward the magikarp through the PC to the Camphrier daycare center and let the staff there release them. He doesn’t want to look at them.

Three days later he finds Serena and Calem’s magikarp taped into the empty space above the rollout drawer for his keyboard. By then he’s back to himself, and the discovery makes him grin.

A week after that, he considers the relative merits of drinking himself into a coma, but having tried it twice already, decides it isn’t worth the hangover. 

Six months is a long time to be left with the gaping absence of a best friend, regardless of anything else he may otherwise be mourning.

He still thinks its his own fault, but the glibness with which he occasionally tells people that is finally sinking into his bones, becoming a reflex rather than an act. Lysandre would probably be weirdly proud of that. He obviously hadn’t cared as much for the Professor as the inverse. No doubt he would be very pleased to discover that some of the obsession is wearing thin and crumbling down.

If he tells himself that story often enough, he’ll believe it eventually.

He finds the pokeball in the back of his bottommost bathroom drawer, behind the q-tips and a tube of antibiotic that he honestly does not remember buying.

April twelfth is a long, long time for a magikarp to go without being found. If he had any idea whose it was, he would probably have congratulated them. It doesn’t quite make him smile, but t gives him the resolve he needs to actually leave his flat the next day. Not the anniversary, because it hasn’t been a year, but something far too close all the same. 

If he actually listened to the radio, or the news, or read his email, or checked his phone, it would all be a glut of _Lysandre this_ and  _how are you holding up that_.

But he has his poor, cooped up magikarp and a free Saturday. He can make a daytrip to Camphrier, to avoid talking to anyone and actually get something worthwhile done. That’s more than he had expected to achieve today.

The river is rough and swollen with spring rains, and he even though he knows that magikarp are worthless for almost anything  _except_ swimming in rough, fast water, he still feels a twinge of guilt as he depresses the release button.

The electric white light is  _large_ _._ He has just enough time to think that perhaps he should have stopped by the lab to measure it properly, before he realizes it is much,  _much_ too large. Large, long, and lumpy.

Oh dear.

There has been a  _grave_ mistake.

That is a very large gyarados, and it has been stuck in a plain pokéball in the bottom of a bathroom cabinet for almost two weeks, if not longer, and for the life of him every single thing Sycamore has ever learned about type advantage and combat and reflex response has left him, because he nearly draws his Charizard, which would have been a  _disaster_.

But the Gyarados does not roar. Its fins do not spread, and it does not gather the whitehot plasma of a hyper beam in its jaws, or develop the fearsome, nauseating aura of a dragon rage, or lash out with its boulderous tail and crush every bone in the professor’s body.

It just… stares.

And the Professor stares back, until some part of him realizes he isn’t dead yet, and it is entirely possible that he isn’t  _going_ to die in the imminent future.

All in all, Augustine Sycamore has not seen very many Gyarados in his life. In person, half a dozen at the most. He has vague recollections of the minute variations in scale pattern, fin proportion, fork angle, length and weight that differentiate otherwise identical specimens.

He does not need to know those things, to recognize this one. This is the only Gyarados the Professor has ever seen in its infancy, the only one he has ever witnessed evolve firsthand.

Which makes no sense, because it  _died_. The entire  _team_ died. Or, if they were trapped in the rubble, still compressed in their digital containments, then they would be dead in another few years, might as well be considered dead now.

And yet, here was this Gyarados, resolutely  _not_.

He cannot afford to hope anything about this. He cannot, reasonably, even afford to keep this pokémon, staring at him balefully. Inasmuch as the eternally angry looking atrocity can be  _bale_.

He’s going to have to call his grandfather. Probably take a few weeks off from work and travel down to Kiloude.

"Okay then." He tells Lysandre’s Gyarados. 

The enormous dragon rumbles, and it’s intimidating. It’s horrifying, because this creature is a killer, trained by another, more insidious type of killer. But it isn’t as if he can just  _abandon_ it.

At least most of the slackers from  _poisson d’avril_ have probably dropped out of his grandfather’s training regimen.

This is going to be a disaster.

But with a fourth pokéball attached to his belt on his way home that night, Sycamore cannot quite find it in himself not to smile.


End file.
